I’m not a neurolinguist, but as the
expression goes, “some of my best friends
are.” They like to remind us that
the human brain is an organizer. As
marvelous as the brain is, it cannot manage random, disassociated data;
therefore, our brains are crafted to sort, classify, categorize, and relate. “STORIES”
exist in all human cultures because human brains use this format to organize
the events of our existence, and give structure and meaning to our lives. For each of us, our lives become stories
linking and defining who and why we are.
With no particular organizational structure, I share a collection of my
stories:
THE
SPOOKS AMONG US
Not only was I born into a home
without indoor plumbing, we didn’t have a telephone. I remember when our first telephone
was installed. It was a big wooden box,
attached high on the living room wall, with a cone on the front to speak into
and an earpiece on a long wire. You
turned a handle to ring the operator. My
Daddy would hold me up high so I could talk to my Grandmother. Today, I carry
my IPhone everywhere, and Siri, understands my commands (usually), and answers
my questions in intelligible, if slightly aprosodic English. What is even more amazing, I actually played
a small role in the basic research that makes Siri (speech recognition and
synthesis) possible.
Without doubt, the singular pivotal
point in my professional career came on a Spring day in 1971 when Dr. Katherine
Safford Harris, asked me if I would like to be her research assistant and work
at Haskins Labs. If my life were a
movie, at that moment the clouds would have rolled back, the trumpets would
have sounded, and a light would have streamed from above. I had just been invited into the inner
sanctum of speech research. Only two
other laboratories in the U.S. and only four in the world (well maybe 5; we
couldn’t be sure about the USSR) had comparable facilities, and Haskins was the
only one where I could conduct my envisioned research on stuttering.
I knew a lot about the wonders of
Haskins Labs, the groundbreaking research done there, the world-renowned
scientists working there, and most importantly, the possibilities open to research
associates. What I didn’t learn for a
long time was that Haskins played a critical role in the Cold War, training
spooks and developing essential technology.
An Internet search on Haskins Labs,
and the three founders, turns up exactly the information I knew when I went to
work there in 1971, and what the whole world knows about their valued
scientific contributions. What is
missing are the stories of three young scientists/engineers recruited by Gen. William
J. Donovan to serve in WWII in the newly created Office of Strategic Services
(OSS). The mandate of the OSS was to
collect and analyze strategic information.
The ability to intercept, record, decrypt, decode, analyze, translate,
search, identify speakers, disguise, code and recode speech transmissions was
particularly critical to this mission, and Donovan needed scientists and engineers.
When the war ended, and the OSS was
abolished, the young scientists/engineers returned to civilian life and
continued to pursue their interests. Dr.
Franklin S. Cooper returned to Haskins Labs. where he pursued his research in
speech perception, production, and synthesis.
When the National Security Act of 1947 created the CIA, it was only
natural that the former OSS scientists/engineers were enlisted to support the
needs of our nation’s security.
The primary research project at
Haskins Labs in the 1970’s was the development of a reading machine for the
blind, funded by the Veterans’ Administration.
This very practical applied research required the same basic research
needed to create machines that understand speech and talking computers. The
fact that this same research was critical to the nation’s intelligence
gathering efforts was fortuitous, if not coincidental.
The
Russians ore Coming; the Russians are coming. I hadn’t been long at the lab when we had our
first visit from the Russians. Over the
years, we entertained Russian visitors once or twice a year – always exciting
occasions. Their arrivals differed from
those of our regular visitors from Japan, Sweden, Germany, Belgium, etc. One interesting difference was the background
of the grad student assigned to take the guests on tour. I think I must have been especially naive
because I was the “guide” of choice
for almost two years. I was uniquely qualified
– I couldn’t reveal anything because I didn’t know anything.
Gradually, the evidence mounted. Security
at the Lab was especially tight; it was a safe haven even in the midst of the
Vietnam War demonstrations. Further, some of our colleagues would simply
disappear for periods of weeks to months.
No one seemed to know where or why they’d gone, and surprisingly, no one
asked with any persistence. They just
vanished and then showed up again and went back to their work. A friend finally took pity on my ignorance,
and answered my questions about a missing associate, “He’s a spook, Fran, smarten up.”
Nondisclosure
– The CIA didn’t recruit me through Haskins.
My consultant position with the CIA came through a private corporation
associated with MIT and Prof. Kenneth Stephens.
Fortunately, my nondisclosure agreement expired years ago, so I can tell
my story without breaking any laws. Unfortunately,
it isn’t very interesting. My expertise
in the effects of laryngeal muscle activity on the acoustic voice signal led
the CIA to ask my advice on analyses of voice recordings for detection of lying. In the end, my involvement was short and
unexciting. They wanted me to tell them
if an experiment they were proposing would work. I told them it wouldn’t; and that was the end
of that. Actually, I think they did the
study anyway, but I was right – it didn’t work.
A more cynical older friend berated
me saying, “Never tell the government it
can’t be done. Take their money; you’ll
discover something while working on their implausible project.” He clearly followed his own advice because,
along with so many others, he received bags of money to work on “Star Wars” (Regan’s Strategic Defense
Initiative, not the movie.)
But there is an important truth in
my friend’s cynical observation. It is
always difficult to obtain funding for basic research, but good basic research
is the foundation for all advances in applied science and technology. The reading machine for the blind, which
formed a justification for funding basic speech research, is only one of the
technologies resulting from this work.
The same research that gave us a jump on the USSR, is transforming the
lives of the hearing impaired and the deaf.
Digital hearing aides (which I now wear); closed captioning (which I use
daily), and multichannel cochlear implants, which are revolutionizing the lives
of the deaf, all stemmed from the same basic research that gave us talking
computers, automatic translations for virtually all languages, and the ability
to search millions of telephone conversations for key words like “bomb.”
A few of the advances made possible by research at Haskins include
better understanding and treatment of stuttering, better surgery for cleft
palate children, treatments for spasmodic dysphonia, a multitude of “talking aids” for those who can’t speak
(including the cerebral palsied and the autistic), and better diagnosis and
education for children with dyslexia.
The
18 ½ Minute Gap, Watergate, and the Kennedy Assignation Tapes– I was working
at Haskins in 1973 when Dr. Cooper was asked to form a panel of experts charged
with investigating the 18 ½ minute gap in the White House Office Tapes of
President Richard Nixon. The six were
all highly ranked scientists; but the man in the trenches doing the basic work
was Ernest Aschkensay, a classmate of mine in the doctoral program at the City
University of New York. Ernest worked at
Federal Scientific in NYC, and conducted the analyses underlying the final
Watergate findings – the erasure was no accident.
On May 31, 1974, I found a brief report
in my mailbox at Haskins – a summary of the committee’s findings. A day later, the report was made public. I still have my Xeroxed copy of the Advisory
Panel’s Report (my personal piece of history).
Ernest Aschkensay and I researched and
published one paper together before he dropped out of the doctoral program to
undertake the Watergate tape analysis.
However, his better-known claim to fame did not occur until 1978 when
his acoustic analyses of the Police tapes from Dealey Plaza revealed that a
bullet was fired from the grassy knoll.
Ernest testified before the Select Committee on Assignations, and his
testimony taken from the Congressional
Record appears in the book, The
Crime of the Century. You can
hear a recording of Ernest discussing his findings at the Kennedy Museum in
Dealey Plaza. No qualified scientist has ever refuted Ernest’s results. Stated simply, Oswald didn’t act alone; the
Kennedy assignation was a conspiracy.
Adventures
in Forensic Speech Science -- My personal forays into forensic speech
science, began because of blatant abuse by prosecutors of the “pseudo-science” of “voice-printing.” So-called
“voice prints” (actually speech
spectrograms) were being used to identify individuals accused of crimes, from
audio recordings (frequently acquired from telephone calls). While voice recordings have valid uses in
speaker identification, the claims made by over-zealous proponents of the
technique were grossly exaggerated.
Since there were so few scientists qualified to refute the FBI “experts” who were testifying in trials
across the country, some of us volunteered. In conjunction with this work some of my
students and I did studies of twins and methods of voice disguise. After the “voice-print”
was discredited, some of us continued to do forensic work, demonstrating the
valid applications of speech and linguistic sciences to speaker identification,
and also “cleaning-up” crime scene
tapes to aid criminal investigations.
Since the speech laboratory at the
University of Texas at Dallas, Callier Center where I worked in the 80’s and
90’s, was one of the best equipped in the South, my colleagues and I took turns
responding to valid requests. In one
case, I was able to demonstrate that the accused ex-husband was not the man
making telephone threats before a firebombing.
In another, we were able to clean up a robbery tape to identify suspect
names, and the gym where two of the robbers worked out.
Cleaning up tapes is an especially
tedious and time-consuming job. The
content can make the job even more unpleasant.
When a digital copy of recordings of the April 19, 1993, final assault
on the Waco Branch Davidian compound was submitted to me, I worked on it for
less than an hour before shutting down. The
hellish soundscape of those events contained auditory images I did not want to
carry to my grave.
My friend, colleague, and developer of
the UTD Callier Speech Laboratory left academia for the opportunities and money
available on the “dark side,” where
he has worked for almost 30 years. Although
he would never speak of it, I know his algorithms allow the NSA to search
millions of recordings for the voices of known terrorists. As an American, I am grateful for all he (and
his colleagues) have done to protect us.
The
Costs of Technology
– The acoustic analyses that required a room of computers at Haskins in the
1970’s, and thousands of dollars of equipment at UTD Callier in the 1980’s and
90’s, can now be done on a laptop or even a smart pad, using software that is
free or inexpensive. The limited numbers
of scientists and grad students who used these in the 1970’s have morphed into
millions. Kids master these tools to
create new forms of music; make dead artists sing new songs; disguise their own
voices; or create soundscapes as complex, intricate, and fascinating as any
optical art. I recently priced an
antique telephone just like the one installed in our home in the early
1940’s. For the current price of that antique
telephone, I could easily buy a computer to do speech analysis and
synthesis -- Go Figure!
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